Law enforcement at the University of Arizona said they plan to charge two students for protesting Border Patrol agents’ presence on campus last month. In a statement announcing the charges, the university’s president accused the students of infringing on “free speech” rights.

The March 20 incident was tailor-made for right-wing outrage. A viral video shows a University of Arizona student standing outside a classroom and criticizing two Border Patrol agents who had come to give a presentation to the school’s Criminal Justice club. A young woman calls the officers “an extension of the KKK” and cites the agency’s destruction of water bottles left for migrants in the desert. Conservative outlets and a border patrol union blasted the students involved for apparently censoring the agents.

Their hand-wringing about students going “berserk” and “harassing” Border Patrol are part of a larger right-wing narrative about the supposed death of free speech at the hands of leftist students. But the student activists, not the federal agents the students shouted down, are the ones facing punishment for their speech. The university’s police force plans to charge two unidentified students with “interference with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution,” for which they face up to six months behind bars.

The University of Arizona did not return a request for comment. In a March 29 email to students, university president Robert Robbins described what he characterized as “a dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus.”

Video shows one student criticizing Border Patrol agents through an open door of a classroom where the agents were speaking to the Criminal Justice club. She does not appear to enter the classroom, and two members of the club appear to call the police on her.

Mr. Fallon, who retired in 2010, said that he had trouble getting the manuscript for his book, “Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the C.I.A., Pentagon, and U.S. Government Conspired to Torture,” cleared for publication.

His plan, he said, had been to publish it at the start of the Trump administration. But the government farmed out his book to numerous agencies, and the review process delayed publication more than eight months, to the fall of 2017, disrupting promotional plans.

When the manuscript was finally returned to him, he said, censors demanded the removal of 113 passages, many of which cited names and events that had been discussed in congressional hearings or newspaper articles. He said he reluctantly consented rather than delay further.

“There are names redacted in my book that are part of the Congressional Record,” Mr. Fallon said. “There are names that are redacted in parts of my book that weren’t redacted in other parts of my book, which shows how ludicrous the process was.”

He also maintained that books by former officials and contractors who defended the C.I.A.’s interrogation program were treated better, including George Tenet, its former director; John Rizzo, its former acting general counsel; Jose Rodriguez, the former head of its Counterterrorism Center; and psychologist James Mitchell, who helped design its program.

That critique dovetails with another recently filed lawsuit related to the prepublication censorship in 2011 of a book by Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. counterterrorism agent who had clashed with the C.I.A. over the agency’s use of torture after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The lawsuit was brought by documentary filmmakers who say Mr. Soufan is still unable to discuss material with them that agency censors had blacked out in his manuscript, even though the C.I.A. permitted the former agency officials to discuss similar things in their own books — like details about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a high-value terrorism suspect.

“The system was about controlling a narrative,” Mr. Soufan said in an interview. “I had self-censored a lot — I know what is classified — but it’s not about protecting sources and methods if I’m allowed to say ‘Abu Zubaydah talked because of waterboarding,’ but if I want to say ‘it wasn’t waterboarding, that’s not what happened,’ I can’t say it.”

A prominent Saudi activist's admission that she once applied for a job at the United Nations is being used as part of the kingdom's case against her, CNN has learned.
Saudi Arabia has not publicly released the charges against women's rights defender Loujain al-Hathloul, or several other prominent female activists who are currently on trial in Riyadh on charges related to their human rights work.
But in a six-page charge sheet for Hathloul's case, seen by CNN, a section titled "crimes committed" includes activism against the kingdom's restrictive male guardianship laws, along with contact with foreign journalists and diplomats.
The charges rely on a series of alleged confessions, according to the documents, which state that Hathloul confessed to applying for a job at the UN along with confessing to being in contact with the human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

For the past several years, Russia has continued with its mission to restrict access to content the state finds objectionable.

Many kinds of sites, from alleged pirate platforms to sites hosting extremist content, have all been affected.

Local ISPs are required by law to block their domains, rendering them inaccessible. However, plenty of circumvention options are available, something the government is trying to address.

During July 2017, President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law aiming to close this loophole. The plan was to prevent citizens from accessing banned sites using VPNs, proxies, Tor, and other anonymizing services.

The threat was simple: if such services were found to be facilitating access to banned platforms, they too could find themselves on Russia’s ‘Internet blacklist’, known locally as FGIS.

While some VPN providers pulled out of Russia well before the new legislation (Private Internet Access exited in 2016 for unconnected reasons), others have continued. Now, however, authorities are attempting to tighten the noose.

The government agency is demanding that the affected services begin interfacing with the FGIS database, blocking the sites listed within. Several other local companies – search giant Yandex, Sputnik, Mail.ru, and Rambler – are already connected to the database and filtering as required.

The National Rifle Association could shut down “very soon,” according the four-page fundraising letter, signed by the group’s executive vice president Wayne LaPierre.

He blamed the dire straits on steps Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has taken to pressure banks and insurance companies that do business with the gun rights organization.

“[R]ight now we’re facing an attack that’s unprecedented not just in the history of the RNA, but in the entire history of our country [all emphasis original],” the letter began. . “And if this attack succeeds, NRA will be forced to shut down forever.”

The threat, LaPierre said, is imminent.

“And let me be clear,” he wrote. “Cuomo’s tactics are already working. One by one, more and more banks and insurance companies across the country are knuckling under to Cuomo’s threat—and telling NRA they won’t do business with us—because they don’t want to be targeted and crushed by Cuomo’s strong-arm tactics and the vast power of thousands of New York bureaucrats.

The letter’s dramatic language and liberal use of underlines puts it in the long, storied tradition of panic-stricken direct-mail fundraising letters. Politicians and organizations looking to raise cash have long made hyperbolic claims about impending catastrophe to scare potential donors into forking over a few bucks. Last April, for instance, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a fundraising email in Nancy Pelosi’s name saying Trump was “inches away from firing Mueller,” as The Washington Examiner reported.

Ticking off a list of recently tweeted presidential proclamations, a panel of Second Circuit judges took turns on Tuesday skewering the argument that Donald Trump acted as a personal citizen in blocking Twitter followers.

“If you are arguing that, it’s curious to me that the Department of Justice is here representing a private entity,” U.S. Circuit Judge Peter Hall told the agency’s senior attorney Jennifer Utrecht.

Hall’s skepticism appeared contagious.

U.S. Circuit Judge Christopher Droney noted that Trump used his personal Twitter account recently to revoke sanctions against North Korea and disseminate a video of the U.S. formal recognition of the disputed Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

“Those aren’t official actions?” Droney asked, incredulously.

Oral arguments on Trump’s Twitter habits came to the Second Circuit after a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional last year for the president to block his critics on any of his accounts, including @realDonaldTrump.

oping to limit the spread of hateful ideas attributed to the suspect accused of the Christchurch killings, New Zealand classified his so-called manifesto as “objectionable” on Saturday, making it a crime to possess or distribute it anywhere in the country.

“People who have downloaded this document, or printed it, should destroy any copies,” said David Shanks, the chief censor in New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs.

“There is an important distinction to be made between ‘hate speech,’ which may be rejected by many right-thinking people but which is legal to express, and this type of publication, which is deliberately constructed to inspire further murder and terrorism,” Mr. Shanks said. “It crosses the line.”

The ruling is part of a wider strategy by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to undermine the attempts by the suspect, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, to gain global notoriety. She has pledged never to utter his name publicly, and to press platforms like Facebook to deny access worldwide to the manifesto, which was published just before the slaughter of 50 people in two mosques, as well as the video the gunman apparently livestreamed of part of the attacks.

Most of the city’s residents live in forced isolation imposed by circumstances, while new arrivals, coming mostly from Eastern Ghouta, are more active in the region. Thus, Afrin gradually began to take the guests’ style.

The migrants from Eastern Ghouta constitute about half the population of Afrin currently, and play the role of the popular incubator of the military authority controlling the region, composed of the Free Syrian Army factions that are affiliated to the Syrian National Army.

The civil administration, which is composed of seven local councils, puts Kurdish council members as a forefront of its activities, while the Interim Government and the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces supervise administrative tasks directly.